The hen is a flightless domestic bird that lays eggs and eats itself. This is basically what most of us know about her, but not much else.
It is normal, since being an animal from which we obtain benefits, we tend to look at it from a utilitarian point of view and it can be difficult for us to change the perspective. However, science has investigated these birds a lot because they are social, easy to breed and quickly get used to humans. It is time for the existing knowledge about chickens to penetrate a little more in society. It may be that in this way, we take more sympathy for them and learn to take better care of them.
It is convenient to begin the presentation with the origins. Domestic chickens and roosters (Gallus gallus domesticus) come from a tropical bird, the red rooster (Gallus gallus), which freely inhabits the forests of Southeast Asia. If these two birds copulated, they would have fertile offspring, so the domestic variety is considered a subspecies of the wild one. Archaeologists have found fossils of domesticated chickens in both China and India that are almost 10,000 years old, but a genetic study indicates that domestication may have occurred about 58,000 years ago, with a margin of error of 16,000 years. That is, tens of thousands of years before livestock and agriculture became widespread.
The study of chicken fossils in China and India date them to 58,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before livestock and agriculture became widespread
Being a chicken is a totally different experience than being a human. For starters, they have one more sense than we do: magnetoreception. Like other birds, they have an internal compass, but why would a chicken need one? After all, they are flightless birds with a relatively small home range, which has nothing to do with migratory birds that need to travel thousands of kilometers. We then have to remember the red rooster and its habitat. Anyone who has been in a tropical forest, with vegetation so dense that the sun cannot be seen, knows how easy it is to get lost.
Their eyesight is excellent, like ours, but they don’t look the same. They use the right eye for small details such as food and the left eye for new stimuli, such as predators that may appear. Also, unlike us, they also see in the ultraviolet range. Artificial light does not normally emit at these high frequencies. For humans, this means nothing to us, but we do limit the vision of chickens when we deprive them of natural light and replace it with artificial light.
Hearing is also an important sense for these animals from a very young age. In fact, there are researchers suggesting that, when the chicks are still in the egg, they communicate with each other through sounds with the aim of hatching at the same time. As for smell and taste, there is the idea that birds lack these senses, but it is wrong, both senses are quite developed in chickens. For example, they use their sense of smell to detect predators, and it has even been proposed that they could release odors themselves to alert the rest of the group to the presence of a predator.
To end with the sensory world of chickens, it is essential to mention touch, highlighting a practice that is somewhat critical from the point of view of animal welfare. This sense is found primarily in the beak, which is used to manipulate the environment just as we use our hands. However, it is often trimmed by chicken farmers to prevent feather pecking. Since the beak contains multiple nerve endings, you will most likely find this practice extremely painful, stressful, and disabling.
It is fortunate that the red rooster continues to live in the wild, because, among other things, we can learn about its social behavior and thus better manage the domestic subspecies, increasing its well-being. It turns out that the hen is the most numerous bird on the planet, but also the worst living. In the macro farms, where sometimes 10,000 hens live together in a small space, cases of cannibalism and self-harm are frequent. This life that we give them has nothing to do with that of their wild relatives, whose groups are much smaller.
The hen is the most numerous bird on the planet, and the one that lives worst: 10,000 chickens are crowded into the macro-farms, so cases of cannibalism and self-harm are frequent
Chickens have a complex social life. Their developed senses allow them to have a sophisticated communication system, with more than 24 different vocalizations. Under natural conditions, both the red rooster and the domestic subspecies form mixed groups of between 2 and 15 individuals in which there is a strong hierarchy. The most dominant rooster, in charge of defending the territory, is followed linearly by the rest of the males and, finally, by the females. They also interact with individuals from other groups, and sometimes hierarchy-altering exchanges occur. When a group reaches a certain stability, the number of aggressions is reduced, they eat more and lay more eggs.
It is important that we know the negative impact that altering their social dynamics can have on hens. A relevant fact to understand their behavior is that both sexes are promiscuous. The objective of the males is to copulate with as many females as possible and repel the rest of the roosters. On the other hand, chickens are much more selective: the better positioned the roosters are in the hierarchy, the more they like them. When a non-dominant male is forcing a hen and there is a dominant male nearby, the hen vocalizes to come to the meeting and throw out the subordinate, thus taking his place. However, less dominant males may also have opportunities, because the hens bypass the hierarchy if they are courted with enough food.
The competition between the males to fertilize the females continues inside their bodies, since the hens can store the sperm of different partners for two weeks and it is the small sperm that compete to fertilize the ovules. On the other hand, when they are forced into copulation and they do not have another rooster to release them, they have an ace up their sleeve: they often expel the semen of the less dominant males from their interior and keep only that of their favorites.
This has only been a brief introduction to the world of chickens and roosters, which is much more complex than it might seem. We could add that they show empathy towards their companions, they have different personalities, the young play if they are not stressed, they have a memory as good as many primates and their cerebral hemispheres are specialized, which gives them a unique mental sophistication. But first and foremost, they are sentient beings and the way we treat them has moral relevance.
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